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A millisecond (from milli-and second; symbol: ms) is a unit of time in the International System of Units equal to one thousandth (0.001 or 10 −3 or 1 / 1000) of a second [1] [2] or 1000 microseconds. A millisecond is to one second, as one second is to approximately 16.67 minutes.
One trillionth of a second. nanosecond: 10 −9 s: One billionth of a second. Time for molecules to fluoresce. shake: 10 −8 s: 10 nanoseconds, also a casual term for a short period of time. microsecond: 10 −6 s: One millionth of a second. Symbol is μs millisecond: 10 −3 s: One thousandth of a second. Shortest time unit used on ...
Clock time and calendar time have duodecimal or sexagesimal orders of magnitude rather than decimal, e.g., a year is 12 months, and a minute is 60 seconds. The smallest meaningful increment of time is the Planck timeāthe time light takes to traverse the Planck distance, many decimal orders of magnitude smaller than a second. [1]
1.67 minutes (or 1 minute 40 seconds) 10 3: kilosecond: 1 000: 16.7 minutes (or 16 minutes and 40 seconds) 10 6: megasecond: 1 000 000: 11.6 days (or 11 days, 13 hours, 46 minutes and 40 seconds) 10 9: gigasecond: 1 000 000 000: 31.7 years (or 31 years, 252 days, 1 hour, 46 minutes, 40 seconds, assuming that there are 7 leap years in the interval)
It is also the standard single-unit time representation in many programming languages, most notably C, and part of UNIX/POSIX standards used by Linux, Mac OS X, etc.; to convert fractional days to fractional seconds, multiply the number by 86400. Fractional seconds are represented as milliseconds (ms), microseconds (μs) or nanoseconds (ns ...
A microsecond is to one second, as one second is to approximately 11.57 days. A microsecond is equal to 1000 nanoseconds or 1 ⁄ 1,000 of a millisecond. Because the next SI prefix is 1000 times larger, measurements of 10 −5 and 10 −4 seconds are typically expressed as tens or hundreds of microseconds.
Each leap second uses the timestamp of a second that immediately precedes or follows it. [3] On a normal UTC day, which has a duration of 86 400 seconds, the Unix time number changes in a continuous manner across midnight. For example, at the end of the day used in the examples above, the time representations progress as follows:
The earliest technical usage for jiffy was defined by Gilbert Newton Lewis (1875–1946). He proposed in 1926 a unit of time called the "jiffy" which was equal to the time it takes light to travel one centimeter in vacuum (approximately 33.3564 picoseconds). [5]